Thin Noon: Issue No. 2 by Thin Noon Journal

a journal

Noon is a time that anticipates shadow, a time when light falls straight on necks and sundials. The light at noon offers analytical clarity; it also begins a heat through which the afternoon radiates. Noon is a dense, spare border that looks into the heart without abandoning the mind. We attempt to do the same by gathering cross-sections of prose, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art.

Editor’s Note I will certainly die. The time of death is uncertain. How will I live? This is a progression that I find myself repeating under my breath when I’m on a plane encountering turbulence. It is a version, skewed slightly into my own words by many weeks of repeated muttering, of a phrase I picked up during an attempt at guided meditation on a sleep-deprived morning. It stuck with consistency where mindfulness and patience did not. The recognition of imminent mortality is meant to catalyze a clarifying, structuring optimism: the realization of our brevity compels you to reach for love and generosity over self-absorption and acquisition. When my chest tightens and I grip the seat of the plane in turbulence, I’m pretty sure I’m not at that point. But I have found a mental proximity to mortality to be a source of light over the past year. It has led me to notice the quickness of my lusts and self-perceptions as they stand and fall in varying degrees of visibility, and to become more playful as I attempt to see past my own mind. I have been lucky enough to work on Thin Noon with a team of editors who are committed to parsing out this sort of shifting multiplicity in their lives and their work. In this spirit, the pieces that we chose for this issue are concerned with the overlap between desire and grief, the simultaneity of satisfaction and loss. Death, brevity, and hard endpoints recur throughout the words and lines gathered here: sometimes they are called into question, and sometimes they are allowed to echo. In all cases, they carry an unexpected lightness. I am profoundly grateful to the entire staff of Thin Noon. To Sara, for her unfailingly gorgeous art. To Maria, for her beautiful, intelligent book design and her patience with my many questions. To Paige, for her belief in this project and her ability to make incredible things happen. To Kalie, for her huge compassion and the richness she brings to our interviews and essays. To Patrick, for his gifts in critical thought and irreverent humor, and for occasionally being a voice of reason. To our contributors, who trust us with their work and make Thin Noon possible: thank you. I hope this little book will give you the same joy it has given me.

Hadley Sorsby-Jones Poetry Editor, Thin Noon 28 April, 2016

Poetry Editor: Hadley Sorsby-Jones Fiction Editors: Patrick Carey and Paige Morris Nonfiction Editor: Kalie Boyne Illustrator: Sara Dunn Graphic Designer: Maria Ji

contents 1 Salem, Oregon by Stefania Gomez 11 Radio Silence by Isabelle Doyle 15 Song of Ourselves by Na誰ma Msechu 25 Art as Grammar: A conversation with Kamille Johnson by Kalie Boyne 35 The Dead Bird Points the Way by Lucia Iglesias 39 Orchard Weight by Helen Bullard and Felice Amato

Salem, Oregon by Stefania Gomez

Alice thought of medieval times, heads of enemies mounted like flags, the day she brought her first garlic crop to market. It was the biggest turnout of Hardneck—the bigger-bulbed, shorter-lasting variety—on personal record. The possums had hardly interfered. “No wonder he doesn’t trust her with a knife,” one Mark Seabrook said to his wide-eyed wife, Carroll, once Alice had explained her methodology, how she had incised a crescent moon through the gullet of one. She had found the possum trapped in plough teeth, knuckles maimed but alive, and finally tested something her mother, who owned the fields before her, had advised to drive rodents out. Her mother was a profitable farmer but particular, so accordingly Alice waited till it had cooled to unfurl the wire coat and pink skin from its body. Though Alice’s husband of three months, Schoch, hadn’t yet given her a child, she could recognize the form she burned on a sheet of iron siding as infantile. She finely ground the ash it shrank into and mixed it with black sand and milk sugar from her pygmy goat. She sprinkled it over her garlic rows every day in January and February when Venus hung in front of Taurus, an earthy, burrowing sort of sign.

Salem, Oregon When she brought her possum dust in each day, Alice knew Schoch always had a word to say about it. Considering that, she felt it strange that he slowly got harder and harder to hear. “Abra-cadbra,” she knew he meant to say at her coating of ash, but all that she heard was “a—.” Stranger, the times he named her the Wicked Witch were altogether obscured, his words covered over with soil. Schoch worked for the Soil & Water department in town, and kept paperwork for the bedroom they leased. He supported the farm in receipts but his stomach wasn’t in it. His degree, from the local state university, was in soil science. To him, the methods Alice used to grow food were an appendix, a vestige from another age threatening to rupture through this one. Alice sprinkled the stuff and her garlic grew fast and thick as blackberries. She sold it to the First Alternative Natural & Organic Foods Co-Op of Salem, Oregon in the spring, like she had squash in the winter and would strawberries in summer and fall. The co-op was located on the 99, the only street that connected the paper mill town to the college town, its traffic lights strung like exposed wires. The building was coated in stucco painted saffron yellow with orange trim, like the Mexican rice served on Taco Tuesday at Squirrel’s Tavern. Alice liked the socializing as much the fish tacos at Squirrel’s. It was her experience that farmers don’t have the oppor-

Thin Noon tunity get out much, and so when they drove from far south or north on the 99, they made a night of it. “Quite a hat,” Schoch had first said of her Stetson. Alice knew the braid trailing down her back, due her cornstalk frame, was the only thing that gave her away to this kind of talk. Schoch took her by her cob hips on Squirrel’s nailed planks, spun her around and around. To Alice, men made the best sense in cycles. She took Schoch as her third at the courthouse a round or two of moons after. + Strawberries, too, worked in rotation. A fifth year crop, strawberries required Alice to grow and harvest a particular series of nutrient consumers in her fields for four years before the fruit itself: radish, and then beetroot, tomatoes, and poppies. All red, as if to condition the soil to the color. Alice felt strawberries were the magic crop in her fields, the one she’d bring to the county fair in July, a month after they began to appear in the ground. In June, it was the beginning of a season. In June, it was the end of something. In June, Schoch brought home Glyphosate in offering, a quart of powder like shards of Mica, bleached. When she saw the carton on the kitchen table, she thought about the way RoundUp would desiccate strawberry

Salem, Oregon foliage, how it pulls small things apart in order to exterminate a whole. She imagined what the spray would do to a body, how it could finish things. She thought about Schoch, and she thought about dismemberment. Saturn hung opposite the moon mid-month, near the shaft of Aries’ horn, and she sowed them, in the heel of every bootprint, eighteen inches apart, implanted tight and precisely in the lining of dirt. Fruit, as lore goes, is planted best under fire signs: Aries, the ram, Leo, the great cat, Sagittarius, the archer. Alice knew the sun was fire, but considered the moon also always lit. She stared at it through the window as it burned the nights when Schoch, cold and amphibious, moved above her, and wished it would grow and swallow the farmhouse, her husband, herself, the fields that would sprout all the quicker next year. He never took to livestock, really, though the Holsteins and Pygmies weren’t the areas of Alice’s fine expertise, either. When the heifer had calved out the summer before, Schoch had seen the calf ’s purple tongue lolling over the emerging front hooves and gagged. Alice had no choice but to put on her gardening gloves, reach in, and pull, unearthing the bony thing inside by its ankles. A season later she was in need of cow blood, hooves, and horns in her garlic field, and she shot the same calf with a .22. Schoch cried when the calf ’s knees hit the ground. Alice felt she could not explain to him how ev-

Thin Noon erything was always returning, always moving towards burial beneath a field, even Schoch himself. Alice wanted the strawberries ripe, red and distended as human hearts, so after sowing them she started with the Yarrow tea. Yarrowflower is a blonde plant. Its clusters looked enough to Alice like Schoch’s thinning hair as she boiled it with ten parts water, then sprayed it over the periodic mounds where seeds lay buried. The tea served to strengthen the strawberry plants, Alice had learned from her mother and her mother before her, but she still thought about radishes, beet, tomatoes and poppy, and other things that must be reaped for descendants to take root. + Caroll Seabrook spread a moonish jelly on Alice’s abdomen, pale as lavender compared to her dark farmer’s hands, and thought, too, about planets, the ones spinning in time with the others in the solar system in every woman who came into her office, pregnant or not. Carroll had watched Alice Redfield, who lay now on the canvas-upholstered examination table, sell some of the best fruits at the co-op for a decade now. The university in town encouraged all kinds of farming techniques in their students, but still Alice’s methods and the methods of the Redfield family were infamous. Mark, at least, called her a witch every time he saw her

Salem, Oregon at market, and Carroll, too, felt there were some things about Alice that were difficult for most people in town, who didn’t do what she and Alice did, to understand. Not to say she raised crops when she helped women to get pregnant, but doulas, like farmers, know a little what kind of magic it takes to stick a hand into life cycles. A sign that hung above the examination table read ALL WOMEN ARE HEALERS, and from studying the otherworldly terrain of women’s bodies she knew it was true that women were all made of something larger than this earth, something as big as the stars, maybe. Alice had fixed three-dozen posters that read U-PICK STRAWBERRY! 2.99/POUND! CALL ALICE REDFIELD JULY 1 to the cork boards around town on the way to her appointment with Carroll, in anticipation of the ones too small to bring to market. Alice had emerged from the fog hovering above the Willamette, or so it seemed to Carroll, and after a quarter of an hour, back she went again. “If only babies grew like your strawberries,” Carroll to Alice on her way out. “Then you might have more luck.” She offered, too, supplemental pills filled with mashed nettle leaf, dandelion, chamomile, oak, and valerian. These things were pulled from the earth and could make Alice’s insides habitable, or, at least—as she had seen in Alice’s body and her own, too—her husband more worthy of inhabiting it.

Thin Noon Compost was another old recipe. Organic material rotted layered on organic material burned, brown and green, like the body, Alice thought, of any man. His limbs, then, would do. Microbes, with their own magic, found sugar in carbon and protein in rot, spit out the rest. Alice made six holes with a stake cut from fir, all at 45-degree angles pointed towards the heart of the pile of organic matter, and in each, an organ removed, stuffed, and replaced: stomach with yarrow, stinging nettle in esophagus, kidney with dandelion, oak bark in gallbladder, chamomile in small intestine, lung with valerian flower. The heart, a kind of fruit, stayed buried when she spread the compost on her field. Alice knew from past trials in harvest that hearts are so like cosmic bodies that the stars pull them, and strawberries with, from the earth in steady rhythm. Ready, surely, by July. In late June, Lyle Embry drove by Aliceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fields on Huckleberry Hill Road, saw a dark Stetson hat pointed towards the spirit realm and a woman underneath it, long hair hoof-brown and glinting. The rain explained the pea coat, its hem brushing the strawberry leaves, and her pointed leather boots, but not the trail of seven cats behind, one on a squash and another now leaping the distance from the ground to the figureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shoulder. He supposed they, too, were awaiting the harvest. In July, after Schoch was gone, Alice stood underneath the canopy, her strawberries piled around her like

Salem, Oregon progeny. She stared at the fair-goers passing by, her arms outstretched, her hat turned up like a halo. She plucked a red fruit from a hemorrhaged pile, brought it to her mouth, and took a careful, wet bite. Deep, astral, she felt a tug.

Stefania Gomez is a junior at Brown University who concentrates in Literary Arts and Ethnic Studies. She is an editor at bluestockings magazine.

Salem, Oregon by Sara Dunn

Radio Silence by Isabelle Doyle

After she is gone, I go to the deli where we held thin hands. Sliced ham, cheddar, soda cans, swiss cheese  turn their holy faces to me. They are about the loss of her. I loved her old body in her red coat.  I loved her sugar shoulders.  I loved the shape of her, the mouth of her. I was a giant when I held her tiny body, when I closed the blue wounds of her eyes. Every year she was smaller. We ate artichoke hearts in her kitchen, her seven-year shattering,  her breathing song of cinnamon. We used to sleep like two soup spoons. I used to put my arm around her,  lean my dark head on her shoulder.

Radio Silence I could sip her when she agedâ&#x20AC;¨ into water. We would put the radio on, open windows, stand still in the roomâ&#x20AC;¨ like we were stuck in spines of cherry trees, the voices reaching our bodies perfectly.

Isabelle Doyle is a freshman at Brown University. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines such as Cargoes, Triangle, The Blue Pencil Online, The Round, and Clerestory. She is studying writing.

Radio Silence by Sara Dunn

Song of Ourselves by Naïma Msechu Loosely inspired by Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass We would be lying if we said we weren’t disappointed when we found out the electric guests were nothing but electric circuits. Not even several circuits (we’d always sparked a mental picture of galaxies of humming loops), but one each, one loop only. And it was how we found out, too, that made us flicker. Everything had been sputtering that day, everything and everyone, really. We had all felt off since that morning, after we’d woken to a day that felt half-charged and never developed into anything more. We sat on the hill for hours that buzzed in the negative, hours of scanning smudged forests stitched with dirt road threads for the trigger. At one point we thought the trigger might be under us — the dirt crackled when we burned the grass off, stalk-leaves of it popping like a chlorophylled chain reaction, but it felt less significant under our boot-soles after — then we thought it might be among us, then one of us. Those hours were the most uncomfortable, eyes shaving layer after layer from each other. Whether or not they truly fell onto the steaming dirt didn’t matter, mostly because we didn’t know but also because we all felt ourselves growing thinner either way. When our shoes slipped from our

Song of Ourselves pacing feet, the sky powered down to a midnight black and we all sat again. It happened seamlessly as a slowly dimmed light and it was only we who glitched through the transition. The electric guests came with a swelling that both excised and heaped, all of us feeling the prickling pressure at once as it pushed us into the ground. We watched them hum to light in the air around the hill. Our feet had been swallowed by the dirt as though they belonged there, had always been there. The electric guests, too, seemed like they had always been in the air surrounding the hill, and we realized with a sinking feeling that was all too physical that maybe they had and we just hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t been able to see them. In any case, they were there now. (Eleven of them, we decided after several recounts, because we were sure there should have been twelve. That would have been fitting somehow.) But there were eleven and they hovered above us, buzzing rings of light that expanded and contracted rhythmically, each shrinking to uneven folds that resembled a glowing carnation, each expanding until its radiant circle was perfectly symmetrical. We sat and watched them, our disappointment turning to grudging awe and our seated bodies halfway sunk in the dirt, which was warm from where weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d scorched it and soggy like moss after days of rain. (Our electricity had always

Thin Noon been a little aqueous.) We couldn’t spark anymore, and we knew it. A couple of us still flickered every once in a while, but it was a defeated sort of electricity, like the crackling, watered-down song of a radio signal too far from its home. The rest of us just swayed in a kind of disconnected limbo, unplugged as we were from the charged grid of that morning’s world. Looking at each other only made it worse, only made us sway faster as our bodies tried to find a common pattern in our chaotic movements. We looked at the electric guests again and there were still eleven of them and they were expanding and contracting oh so rhythmically, a model that was close yet desperately unreachable, and we thought that if we could just orient them above the sloping valley and the smudged forests and the roads that connected the copses in constellations, we could mimic them, but it was dead-battery dark and we really couldn’t see a thing. Then roots began to grow out of our toes, burrowing deeper into the ground than we remembered but still as though chasing a memory. We let our eyes fall shut and thought ourselves down there with them, mind spirals racing after toe-root coils until we anchored on a spongy recollection, a knowledge we hadn’t touched in a while. It felt old, ancient. We sensed we hadn’t been there since before the electric guests first arrived When we opened our eyes, we were barely moving, and the guests had stopped altogether. They were fully

Song of Ourselves expanded and brighter with an electricity that crackled into the darkness, making it seem like it was deepening, stretching out away from the hill in horizontal plummets that gave us vertigo when we stared too long. They hung like rings of orbit that had been peeled from around some high-powered sun and now yearned for a cosmic reunion with a pull that made the air feel taut as a bent-back branch. They were waiting, but for what, we weren’t sure. Our roots allowed us to sway, and this time we had the purchase needed to do it willingly. We were already a lot more fluid then, wetted by whatever our roots had tapped into, and though our movements in the charged air caused a couple of involuntary sparks and some splutters, we were soon swirling it. We got the idea that we could shift the electric guests with the air currents we produced, so we swayed faster and faster until the air molecules popped and shattered in watery electrocutions, but either the guests were too far away or our currents weren’t strong enough. The guests never budged. We had a choice then, and it wasn’t easy. Some of us wanted to stay in the ground the way we had been before the electric guests had made us electric hosts, and some of us wanted to retract our roots and regain the foreign electricity. But splitting up wasn’t an option, and when — after a long moment in which all that

Thin Noon could be heard was the slow pulse of the hill and the luminescent whine of the guests — one of us (we never really knew who, everything was so tangled down there) unlatched her roots from the hill’s spongy heart, we all did the same. The electric guests waited until we were standing, our waterlogged feet resting on but detached from the tepid dirt. Then they broke their looped selves in an explosion that our minds filled in as the cracking sound of a blown fuse, and the world went dark for a split-second. When the guests reappeared, they were connected into one large electric circuit that began to contract as we watched, perfect only in the sliver of time while we were too stunned to see it and then rapidly wrinkling inwards in a powerful shrivel. First they were around us, the tiny lights of their consciousness sharp as thorns, pricking yet not alarming. And then they were inside us. The darkness slipped away as the guests made themselves comfortable, a fizzy dissolution that we later agreed felt like the patter of rain on a tin roof and a dragonfly’s buzzing made palpable, our bodies turning electric, and by the time the last pinpricks finished frothing, the sky was a lighter gray than it had been in a long time. We even thought it might be lighter than it had ever been — the whole world looked a little different.

Song of Ourselves The hill was grassy again, but we were mostly sure it was more vibrant than we remembered. The dirt roads were specked with shards of something that sparkled as they sliced through the trees, which were crisply coniferous where before they had been smudged. The world was sharper, now that each one of the electric guests was in each of us, or maybe now that one of them was in each of us, though we didn’t know how many of us there were. Or rather we did know, but we didn’t have a number for it. We just knew that it was greater than eleven, greater even than twelve, and still, somehow, fitting.

Naïma Msechu is a junior at Brown University concentrating in Literary Arts and Comparative Literature. Her work has appeared in The Postscript Journal, The Round, Wigleaf, and Post- Magazine. She calls both Bavaria and rural Missouri home, but likes neither yodeling nor cow tipping.

Song of Ourselves by Sara Dunn

Art as Grammar A conversation with Kamille Johnson

by Kalie Boyne Kalie Boyne: What does art as grammar mean to your own artistic/academic practice? Why is this understanding of art as intertwined with theory significant to you? Kamille Johnson: Let’s begin by defining “art as grammar.” So I’ll first start off by saying that my chosen medium is definitely poetry, definitely words. I think that my relationship to words is symbolic and historical because at the end of the day, a word is just an arbitrary specifier that is rooted in history and tradition. For me, the idea of poetry is looking at how you can craft words to create moods — how you can use a string of words to portray a larger idea or a moment, and how that moment is reflective of a broader experience. That being said, I really like shorter poems. I like little vignettes, which is why I try and carry a notebook with me everywhere. KB: Oh that’s cool! Are there specific things or themes you are inspired by on a daily basis? KJ: I think there are specific things — if I’m going about my day and I’m drawn to something in particular, I want to know why it reaches out to me, so I try to put that into words. For the classic example, lets take a landscape. Why is it that the sunset looks so incredible, what sorts of feelings do I get from the blues and the purples and the pinks, and how do those

Art as Grammar feelings come out in words that have seemingly no relation to the colors themselves? Or if I want to focus on the colors, I’ll personify them, give them some kind of agency and purpose, recognizing the breakdown of how pink turns to purple turns to blue all at once as the sun is going down. It sounds like a Yeats poem in the making, but moments like those force me to find what’s new in what I see. How does my eye catch what is beyond the classic, the stereotype, the predictable. At the end of the day, I take sanctuary in the fact that my eye came from a world that has classics of its own, so how can I pull from those? KB: So if poetry for you is about using words as symbols that deepen your understanding of what you see, is writing also your way of making sense of symbols in the world around us? KJ: Oh, for sure. I think that a poem is, for me, a living thing, because it reflects my mental state and my worldview, which is always changing. So a poem at a certain point in my life would be written completely differently if I experienced the same thing five years later. That being said, I fully agree with the phrase “A poem is never done, it’s just abandoned.” KB: Yeah, and relating that to academia, it’s like when you go back to a text you read years before and interpret it so differently. When we read Aimé Cesaire’s Discourse On Colonialism in our capstone class recently, the things I had underlined in my copy when I read it three years ago were completely different than the parts I thought were significant when I reread it a few weeks ago. I find that so interesting, because it’s the same book but my lens that I read it through has changed so much

Thin Noon over the past few years. So for you, poetry is a way for you to weave symbols together and make sense of the world in that moment, and record your specific lens in that moment… KJ: Oh yeah, for me, it’s about the idea of experiencing a text. In terms of linking academics to my work, I think it’s really important to position my work in a historical lineage. That’s why theory is at the root of my poetry, because I think that I deal with the issue of erasure a lot in my academic trajectory. The idea of voices being lost, or not even being found. I was talking with my friend recently, who wants to start a family history space for his family as he builds it moving forward. He was talking about how he would frame pictures of all the men in his family, and I asked where the women were in this, because not including them in the same way is a form of erasure. He said well, they don’t even need to be represented because it’s so obvious that they’re already there. That, to me, is scary. Because the assumptions of representation are political. They’re ingrained in a tradition that reflects how we see each other as humans. So going back to academia, I think that the way poets, musicians, and artists who have come before are represented in an academic space — where the production of knowledge happens — influences how we make meaning of historical moments, and that’s why I want to carry those names forward. Incorporating them into my work is a way of combating that erasure. I know this is getting pretty general so I’ll give you an example. There’s a poem by Ali Mazrui that was introduced to me by Anani Dzidzienyo in his course “Afro-Latin Americas and Blackness in the Americas.” Shouts to Anani — he’s one of my favorite professors. Anyway, the poem begins “Forget where you came from / Remember

Art as Grammar what you look like. // Forget your ancestry. / Remember your skin color…” I know this as a poem of defiance. For me, this poem carries a lot of anger and resilience — it captures the gap I’m trying to close between my history and myself: the two are deeply entwined and cannot be separated. It’s ironic in that, for me, it comes from a place of trying to hold onto one’s past while trying not to dwell on it. So anyway, what I have been trying to do is memorize poems, specific quotes and phrases that people have said, so that when I go to write, those ideas and perspectives are in me. They inform my own work in this way, because my experience in the world is so rooted in history. As a black woman, there’s no way you’ll be able to get away from history ever. So how does that manifest itself in your work, and how do you carry that forward in a positive way, and make sense of this history of representation in a positive way, as a type of reclaiming? KB: Wow, so memorizing all these artists who came before you is not just a way of situating your own work in this history, it’s also modifying the history itself, questioning the way these figures are remembered — KJ: Right, calling this history into question and revitalizing a different type of history. KB: When did you start writing poetry with this intention? KJ: I think it was when I first started in Africana that I began to have new intentions for my work. If I’m being real, Africana forced me to look at the world completely differently. I come from a very white world, so when I took the Intro class,

Thin Noon I was like, what’s going on?! It’s a sad wake up call to realize everything I learned in my education was filtered through a set of white men. That’s not cool. So all of a sudden I had all these questions, and I had to figure out what to do to essentially reconstruct the way I see the world. I think this period was also intensified by the fact that I was coming so far from home, from Northern California to Providence, and I had just come out of a relationship that meant a lot to me. I started writing when I was sixteen. I was going through a rough time in high school and my friend told me I should just write a letter and just put it all on paper. What came out was really stupid, absolutely grandiose and absurd. But it was and still is a way that I work through and engage with the world. Which has changed so much — and what is visible to me has changed so much. And that has a lot to do with the theories I grapple with in Africana Studies. KB: Do you feel like poetry helps you make those academic theories more accessible to others, yourself, or both? KJ: Right now, I’m actually trying really hard to write without an audience in mind. There are so many writers around, and it’s hard to think that what you’re doing matters. For me, at least, if I remove the idea that someone is evaluating or even reading my writing, it takes a lot of the pressure off. That being said, the idea of trying to use writing as a tool of expression words means that I have to map emotions through a specific set of words. There are so many different times when I try to describe the same feeling in various ways. There are a lot of instances when I go through things without having the words to make sense of it. Writing is a way of not necessarily

Art as Grammar trying to pin it down, but more just a way to think about it, explore it, and try to make it accessible to my own mind in a way that feels fulfilling, and right now, the idea that its accessible to others is just an added benefit. I’m sure down the road this will change and I’ll be writing to particular groups of people. KB: Right, and I think that’s why metaphor is important, because there just aren’t enough words that exist in English that can stand in for things you’re experiencing or feeling. Which can be invalidating and confusing. KJ: I agree, and that’s why I’m also really interested in learning words in other languages. Like on Friday, when we were talking about untranslatable words, you brought up that Japanese word — do you remember? KB: Kintsukuroi, to repair something with gold in a way that makes it more beautiful for having been broken. KJ: And that encapsulates a whole set of values! In some ways, the fact that a single word like this doesn’t exist in English says a bit about those who speak it, feel me? I definitely find myself limited by the English language, reaching for other forms of communication. My favorite Portuguese word is Axé. There’s no direct translation, but it generally represents the feeling of being full of life. Finding these words opens my mind to a whole other set of options. Being able to learn these new vocabularies is so important because it means you can relate to a whole other set of people KB: A whole other history and set of cultural values, too.

Thin Noon

KJ: And being able to relate to another history means that you see so many different experiences as you’re moving through the world. What becomes visible to you is totally different. Ways of living and thinking about life become visible, and influence your own. KB: Are there specific artists or mediums that influence your work? KJ: Yeah, a whole bunch. I’ll preface this by saying that my mom started her art gallery in San Francisco when I was two years old, so I literally grew up surrounded by art. My sister’s a photographer and as she figures her work out, she’ll often show me things that I would not have been exposed to otherwise; same with my mom. So I think that because of my background, it’s very easy for me to consider art as a form of grammar, because I know that there are so many different forces that push each piece of art — how did I encounter the artwork, what type of space was this art created in, who is curating the art, who is giving voice to this artist? When I encounter a piece, these questions make it all the more engaging. For the pieces I’m interested in now, all these issues of erasure that I learn about in Africana come to a head. KB: Yeah, what art do we see and why, whose views and experiences are being expressed and highlighted, like in history textbooks, the art they show — KJ: Right, the kind of artistic ideas they want people to see and remember. That speaks to a whole set of community

Art as Grammar values, societal values, and traditions. KB: What kind of a practice are you trying to cultivate within your own work, and where do you gain inspiration for that? Since you are situating your art within a specific history, you will become a part of it. If years from now there’s a kid trying to do the same thing and looking to your work for inspiration, what do you want them to have learned from you? KJ: In terms of practice, you have to write every single day. I don’t do that, but it’s something that must be done in order to be successful. Learning to access one’s imagination is a daily process. I was at Princeton for a literary conference a couple years ago, and Joyce Carol Oates spoke. She said that every poet and writer, up until they’re twenty-one, is just learning how to access their imagination. I think that’s a huge mind-boggling idea, that you have to learn how to access your own imagination and that’s a practice. In terms of who I look to for inspiration, I look at a lot of different artistic forms. My sister sends me a lot of things — she sent me Kamasi Washington’s performance of “The Epic,” which is…epic. He’s a jazz musician, and that’s another form of art that I think is an incredibly important art form — the history of jazz, and the contribution of jazz to American culture by the black community is enormous. In terms of photography, Carrie Mae Weems plays a huge role in combating erasure, Hank Willis Thomas…and these are all black artists because that’s where my head’s been at. As for poets, the list goes on forever, but right now I’m thinking about Maurice Manning, Terrance Hays, and Claudia Rankine, just to name a few.

Thin Noon

The other thing I’ve become very interested in is digital media, and the opportunities presented by newly available technologies. There’s a website, creativeapplications.net, that is basically an archive of large-scale tech used for artistic purposes. My sister and I are working on publishing her chapbook in virtual reality, looking at different ways that people can interact with art and gain access to it. I think that it’s important to consider myself just one form of artist, or one form of anything, really. I struggle with labels like “artist” because I think that I’m just a creator, I like to make shit, regardless of what form it takes.

Kamille Johnson is a maker of many things who concentrates in Africana Studies and Science and Society at Brown University. She is an editor for the College Hill Independent and loves to work at and around the intersection of art and technology.

Art as Grammar by Sara Dunn

The Dead Bird Points the Way by Lucia Iglesias

I open my eyes in a forest. Willows and aspens all around me — I stand amongst strangers. There is no path through the trees. The dead bird points the way. I find him lying at my feet. Green as full-hearted buds he is, lusty May green. His talons clutch a spume of flowering Angelica, Valerian, Dogbane, and Pennyroyal—blossoms still cheeky with dew between his withered toes. With his corsage of wild spring he points me deeper into the forest. And deeper I go. Quivering willows brush so close my sight greens and everything turns to leaves. Shcrunsch — fracturing of skull, tiny bird skull, crunching beneath my heel. All the little pieces of bone rasp against each other as my foot reshapes the skull. He was dead already, this bird with the breast dappled grey like the creek bottom. A slither of yellow under the feathers, a tinge of ill. His beak tucked into plumed breast, almost as if only dozing. But that yellow. Dead birds are strung out across the pathless dirt, bright beads in a necklace left just for me.

The Dead Bird Points the Way Feathers vermeil and celandine, oxblood and ocher. Bird by bird I trace the necklace of tiny deaths. The last bead is a sapphire, a rock thrush. The feathered swell of unbeating bird nests in Imogen’s hand. She flings the thrush’s proud ribcage into the sky. With a whiffle of flailing blue, the thrush flies high and away. If I could retrace the carcass-necklace and fling each bird back to life—but dusk, that carrion-eater, has already swallowed them whole, gobbling the forest into darkness behind me. Imogen takes my hand, cupping it between hers tenderly as if it were a dead bird.

Lucia Iglesias was raised by witches and winged things in the grove. She ran away to Brown University and now wanders through stories old and new, seeking a path back to that grove or perhaps another.

The Dead Bird Points the Way by Sara Dunn

Orchard Weight by Helen Bullard and Felice Amato

To become like the pit of a peach — ancient emblematic fossil that holds all locked in a prayer which is a gesture which is now just bone. What of the bruise-able flesh…the sweet that isn’t sweet and the sour that isn’t sour and the juice that runs down our faces and collects World-Dust — especially between our breasts, especially across “the” rib? I tasted the inner seed once. It was like an almond but it bit my tongue and left it stinging. It stung me, too, at first. Like the first morning-after, like the first morn of autumn, like the cold of the frost in the fields. Like my frost bitten fingers, my paper-cut knuckle, the bee sting tweezed out in the spring. But, what of that Dust? Of the World at our breast, of that hardening coating of time? Of that tip of the rib, that metallic taste, the knowledge of knowledge’s worth? Let the seed fall. Let it be spice. Let it bloom in clouds [of flour]. Let the frost come. Let the hardening happen. Let it be neither. But both. Clouds of flour brought now to bowl and mixed and shaped. Overkneaded and overknuckled to a tough white torso…now arms…and head. Roll long legs between my fingers and the table’s disapproving knowledge of the way dough works. The hardening is

Orchard Weight happening and in a few days I will pit eye tooth against dough and taste the metal of my blood when I can’t bite off the head-- I take a leg instead. Gnaw and gnarl and no one could and know one could. To become [like the kneaded form; the known]. The kneaded needed cruciform, of arms and legs and blood and knowledge, of knowing wood and dust and tillage. Of sun toward creator’s cargo, of touch toward this orchards weight. To create. And breathe, and foist, and harden. To reach, and touch, and wade. To bargain. This sap now slips (sticks) deep to the bone. And now let ice into this flow. And now, step out into the water. Hand to hand. The weight is foisted-orchard weight. Into my palm and my palm from your palm but with the frost the skin splits sap seeps and sticks and sickens but only slightly. But still. Wade out somewhere and rinse it? To find the icy water hardens it to the skin... in the webbing and the crooks and the weave of the hand there’s a whisper of what happened that I can’t scrape away. But scrape, all the same! Scrape the whisper towards the purr; card the fleece! Rub the salted cloth. Scour, from hand to crook, from foot to earth. Scrape the water fresh again! Sever the warp and weft. Scrape and gush, gush and surge, surge and soak. From soak to split to sop, from cloth to cloud, to glittering salt stacks, heating in the saltpans, giving life to cattle high on the hills. The overseers. Saltlicks to stone pits. Quarried, and

Thin Noon quarried again. Gathering speed, blowing in swirls, ground back into piles of Dust. The cattle high on the hillsâ&#x20AC;ŚTheir spines are not for riding. Their tongues stick to the not-sweet, not-sour. Their ribs poke out in the heat.

Helen Bullard is a research-based storyteller, and her practice tells stories about animals. She is interested in cultural histories, ecological and industrial relationships between animals. Her media ranges from performance and video, to sculpture, photography, and written forms. She is currently telling the story of the horseshoe crab in a self-designed PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Felice Amato is an artist whose work takes many forms of narrative, including drawing, sung and spoken text, outdoor sculpture installations, and puppetry/object performance. In her self-designed PhD program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she incorporates folklore, gender studies, and creative writing into a multi-disciplinary investigation of the female self.

Orchard Weight by Sara Dunn